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All the outstanding playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and locked in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a